Wednesday brings us a House Communications Subcommittee hearing on the reauthorization of the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act (STELA). You hear STELA, you think Marlon Brando. But this mandatory renewal – the old law expires December 31 – is crucial to keeping satellite television subscribers connected to the shows they like. And is a skirmish in a broader Crony Socialism war. STELA in part | Read More »

The Left is in a perpetual state of anti-free market angst. Even the barest inkling of private sector activity drives them bananas. They want to stop it – and if they can’t, they try to retard it as much as possible. Their main impediment agent is government. The more space government takes up – the less room there is for private enterprise. So the Left | Read More »

Netflix uses a lot of bandwidth, and if they start broadcasting 4k movies, then that amount is going to go up. It’s a lot of one-way bandwidth, too. There’s no interchange of data going to and from users. It’s all being piped out. So the traditional concept of ‘peering’ where two Internet companies connect for free to send data both ways, really doesn’t make sense. Thus, Netflix is owning up and making deals to cover that bandwidth. More deals are likely coming. This is good news, as it means realistic investments in Internet infrastructure to make sure we all have enough room for the data we download. The fact that the Net Neuties are shrieking hysterically about this just proves what I was saying all along: Net Neutrality was all about trying to socialize the Internet.

I’ve been talking about FCC overreach in this space for a long time, but now the Obama FCC is trying so hard to go so far, everyone’s noticing now. Yes, the FCC’s plan to attack free speech got so much unkind attention that it’s been pulled, for now. Don’t count on it being gone forever, though.

Federal regulation of the Internet is a bad idea. So is federal regulation of states that would rather keep their local governments out of the Internet business. Following a recent federal court ruling about the power of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to regulate the Internet, supporters of government-run broadband Internet service have urged the FCC to preempt state restrictions on local government efforts to | Read More »

Federal regulation of the Internet is a bad idea. So is federal regulation of states that would rather keep their local governments out of the Internet business. Following a recent federal court ruling about the power of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to regulate the Internet, supporters of government-run broadband Internet service have urged the FCC to preempt state restrictions on local government efforts to | Read More »

In another bad sign for digital currencies. another prominent digital currency, Dogecoin, is experiencing a major glitch that threatens to disrupt commerce or even take people’s money away from them. Why do people tolerate all the volatility and instability of digital currencies? Easy: it lets them evade the law. That’s it. That’s why these things are going anywhere at all, because they’re a magnet for the scum of the earth.

Verizon v. FCC, the court decision overturning the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) net neutrality rules, didn’t rule directly on the First Amendment issues. It did, however, reject the reasoning of net neutrality advocates who claim Internet service providers (ISPs) are not entitled to freedom of speech. The court recognized that, in terms of the functionality that it offers consumers and the economic relationships among industry participants, the Internet is | Read More »

Sometimes you just know somebody needs primaried. Wednesday I learned of a member of Congress who’s clearly only in the House because daddy was in the House before him, and he’s using the influence he has out a personal sense of entitlement. That’s clearly why Bill Shuster wants to ban phones on planes, despite both the OBama FCC and FAA thinking it’s a good idea to let the market decide this. Shuster was first elected in 2001. He needs a refresher on what happened in 2001, that would make us consider why passengers on planes may want that option, and why we should let Mister Market figure it out, instead of a blanket ban.

Look we get it, he’s big important man and he flies on planes often, and so he wants to order the airlines to do what he wants, because that’s what he thinks the perk of being the son of a Congressman is. But that’s why we need to defeat his bill, and defeat him in the primary.

The Barack Obama Administration has been overstepping its Constitutional bounds since just about five minutes after its first inauguration. They have long been practicing a regulatory-overreach overrun approach. Imposing myriad new regs in innumerable directions – oft aimed at the free market’s foundational sectors and Democrats’ political enemies. The power grab victims are forced to take it – or to waste huge sums of money | Read More »

So, Retransmission Consent. You know what happens when you rig the system to limit competition, as the Congress and the FCC did in the early days of Cable? Broadcasters raking in the bucks. Never would I say that copyright should be attacked, but that price to license these broadcasts should be dictated by the open market. Let broadcasters compete.

More FCC: Data use continues to go up, and it probably makes sense to remove barriers to investment on expanding our wireless capacity in this country. We still need spectrum, but the build out matters after that spectrum is acquired, as well.

All this is perfectly good reason to want to gut the FCC by reforming the Communications Act, but again, I just don’t trust the current legislative process to succeed at this in one big bill. When was the last time we had one big bill that worked well? Not in many years. I’d love to be proven wrong, but I’m not optimistic.